G-RAID by Medea

[VideoTechMan]

Has anyone bought any of Medea's video array products? Ive been looking at this external firewire model for $299 for the 160GB model. It has both Firewire 400 and 800 ports. I may consider this instead of the expensive upgrade for a second drive on the laptop I will be ordering pretty soon, so at least I will have portability between my home desktop and laptop. Heres the link:
http://www.medea.com/

VTM

[gastorgrab]

Another option (another way of doing things) might be ReByte.

Uses standard hardware, so you can upgrade it yourself. With ATA-133 RAID 1-5 over Gigabit Ethernet for descent performance, and its accessable by every machine on your home network.

Got an old PC laying around?

[ViRaL1]

Also have to add in the cost of GbE switch and new NICs. Might also want to consider an external firewire enclosure that enabled you to add whatever drives you wanted and increase your storage as needed.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=51080&item=5114261182&tc=photo#...ayphotohosting

I'm thinking about the 9-bay at the bottom. Only FW400 atm, but their store link says to check back for FW800 soon.

[gastorgrab]

I'm thinking about the 9-bay at the bottom. Only FW400 atm, but their store link says to check back for FW800 soon.

How come there are 4 sets of FireWire connectors on the back? Is this 4 dual-drive controllers in a common case?



--------edit---------------

It sure is:

Four Oxford 911 chipset Firewire boards

Also relies on software RAID.

RAID : Ideal as a part of your total RAID or JBOD solution (software RAID support is built-in on Windows 2000/Xp Pro/OS X Server)

I think the G-RAID looks alot better.

[mujahid7ia]

I hear software RAID is very unreliable and should only be used for testing purposes [Upgrading and Repairing PCs].

[gastorgrab]

My concern is the load that it puts on the CPU. (software RAID)

From the specs, it looks like the G-RAID has its own RAID controller (hardware RAID).

[VideoTechMan]

Yeah, a tower-like firewire enclousure case would be too much a pain to take along on the road with a laptop. From what I read of the specs of the G-RAID, I believe it does have their own RAID hardware controller, so all you would have to do is connect to the laptop. Plus the size is small enough to take anywhere.

VTM